


The Last Adventure of Donna Noble

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Bittersweet Ending, Friendship, Gen, POC Doctor, POV Donna, POV The Doctor (Doctor Who), Reminiscing, fourteenth doctor - freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 06:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5036587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna Noble lives a long, happy, fantastic, NORMAL life. And then she dies.</p>
<p>But first, a familiar stranger with a blue box and an unrecognizable face takes her on one final adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Adventure of Donna Noble

**Author's Note:**

> I've always sort of imagined, ever since he sealed her memories away, that this was where things would end up with Donna and the Doctor. Because he had to give her back her memories before she died, he just had to.
> 
> I decided, though, I didn't think any of the current regenerations could handle something like this, emotionally, so I've popped ahead a couple regenrations. Also, the doctor is dark-skinned here, but other than that I've tried to keep him pretty racially ambiguous so that you can really imagine him however you want. I think the only consistent descriptors I give are that he has dark eyes, short hair, and brown skin, and he's a skinny beanpole like Ten, so you can probably imagine a variety of faces from that.
> 
> Finally, though this is all in third person, it does swap pov a couple of times, but it should be easy to tell whose thoughts are whose.

It takes the Doctor upwards of four regenerations before he has the courage to step onto the street of a well-to-do London neighborhood and look up at house number 6, on January the 20th, at 7:24 in the evening. The year is 2055 and he looks different, of course he does – this time his skin is brown and his hair (still not ginger) is cropped short, and there’s a birthmark like claw scars on his left arm. His eyes are dark enough to be black, his jaw is a little sharper than in the previous regeneration, and he’s developed the atrocious nervous habit of gnawing on the knuckle of his littlest finger when he’s nervous. His voice is different, too, though standing on that street he can feel his mouth preparing to ape a familiar old South London accent. He’s rail-thin again, a proper beanpole, and only a bit taller than the last time he saw the woman he’s about to meet. He hasn’t lost his penchant for formalwear, although he’s honestly thought better of the chucks and pinstriped suits, thank goodness.

(He tries not to even recall bow ties and fezzes.)

For all that, he can’t help shrugging on that long tan coat from Janis Joplin before he steps out of the TARDIS, because after several thousand years, well, a man tends to have sentiment running in his veins instead of blood.

His walk up to the door of Number 6 is measured. The anticipation itching in his veins tells him to run, run, but he holds himself back. It’s not like it was, nor could it be. He won’t be dashing off with a young woman’s hand in his, no matter how much he wishes it were so.

The door is locked.

It would be, of course, but his sonic is very good at opening doors, and with just a press of a button and a little ringing buzz and a soft blue-green glow, the front door clicks. He steps inside. Takes a deep breath. Reminds himself not to run. Instead, he strides through the house slowly, taking it in, keeping his trembling hands in his trouser pockets where he can’t see them.

She looks happy, in all the photos on the walls.

Finally, he arrives at a bedroom. The door is open, and a woman with long white hair lies on the bed, flipping through channels on the television with a displeased look in her eyes. The sound is off. When he takes a step into the room, she straightens her posture and sits up; regal and fierce and indignant and Donna Noble.

“If you’ve come here to steal something,” she tells him sharply, “I don’t even care ‘cause I’m on my way out anyway, and if you’re here to kill me don’t even bother, you overdressed numpty. I’ve still got a mean right hook even at my age.”

Even as long as he’s given himself, the sound of his best mate’s voice, almost unchanged, makes his hearts skip a beat each. A grin spreads over the Doctor’s face and all he can manage is an amused exhale because he’s too bowled over to properly laugh.

“Hello, Donna,” he tells her. “It’s been a long time. Well, longer for me than you, though I’m sure that’s probably rather hard for you to believe.”

Her eyes – clear, and he thanks every star in the sky and every atom in the Time Vortex for that – narrow at him suspiciously.

“Who the hell are you?” she demands.

“I’m the Doctor,” he says simply, and it’s like a dam breaking to say it.

She’s startled by that, but he can tell she still doesn’t remember and that’s fine. All he needs is a little opening. He strides forward and cradles her head between his hands, thumbs at her cheekbones, and presses his forehead to hers. Everything is unlocking, heat and pressure and pain, all the enormity of a Time Lord consciousness trapped in the frail body of a dying woman. Her gasp of pain breaks his hearts, but when he finally pulls away she’s grinning like a loon with tears in her eyes.

“Hello spaceman,” she says, and it tears an almost-inaudible breath from his lips. “Lookin’ good.”

He squeezes her close, a bundle of woman, thin, bony, but oh so Donna.

“Today is the day you die,” he tells her thickly. “So I came back to send you off properly.”

She laughs.

“Better hop to it then, beanpole!”

The Doctor smiles.

“I’ve got one last adventure planned for you, Donna Noble. Up for it?” he asks.

And though he can see the flickers of pain behind her eyes, she nods. He helps her out of bed, down the stairs, and out the door and when she sees the TARDIS gleaming in the moonlight she gasps.

“Oh, I want to run to it,” Donna admits, squeezing the Doctor’s dark hand in her too-pale one.

“As you wish, milady.”

He scoops her into his arms – she’s so light, like a feather, barely there – and runs for the TARDIS in long loping strides. With a quick click of his fingers the doors open and he rushes them inside without breaking step. Donna is laughing with her hands clutching his bony shoulders. In the light of the TARDIS interior, he can still see spare strands of red in her white hair.

“You’ve redecorated,” she notes as he sets her down. “I don’t like it.”

He laughs because he remembers those words, a distant echo in his own voice, so many different times.

“Well, I’ll just rebuild it quick then, shall I?” he quips.

“You’d better just, if you’re planning on having any real adventures with me.”

The Doctor can’t stop smiling, and doesn’t even want to. But the tears slipping down his cheeks don’t slow either and that’s a little more unfortunate. Crying from happiness. The phrase humany-wumany blips in his brain but is quickly dismissed. He clears his throat.

“I thought we’d go see some sights,” he says at last, scrubbing self-consciously at his face. “The Medusa Cascade, a binary supernova… The Sagittarius B2 Cloud – d’you know it’s just a cloud of alcohol floating in space? Supposed to taste like raspberry-flavored rum.” Donna interrupts him with a sharp ‘ha!’ of amusement. “I thought you’d get a kick outta that, though most of it’s undrinkable. Still!”

The fond look in her eyes makes him so happy that it almost hurts, and when he looks away she straightens his lapels and draws his attention back to her.

“I’m so ready,” she says to him. “I’m so ready to see it all. I don’t even care where we go, I missed this ship. I missed the humming and you hoppin’ about like a madman. I missed the way my thoughts sparkle. Look at me, on my deathbed and I can still calculate the trajectory to get us where we need to go.”

She steps away, dancerlike with all the energy of a single Time Lord doing the job of six, and begins fiddling with levers and buttons, eyes narrowed in focus, but he catches her left hand in between his.

“There’s one more place. Donna, I thought, last… Let’s go see the Ood.”

She looks at him and nods with her eyes shimmering, then gives an ugly sniffle and begins to hurry around the console, pressing buttons. He helps her, and halfway through has to take over entirely when she begins mumbling about the quantum physics of bubble universes and interdimensional wormholes and flipping the same switch back and forth intently, a broken record. When she snaps back to herself vertigo hits her, and for the rest of the journey she’s relegated to a seat on the console room’s makeshift sofa.

She complains and back-seat drives fervently and he loves every second of it.

They whirl right to the edge of the Sagittarius B2 Cloud, which goes on for hundreds of miles, and he opens the door. There’s nothing but space out there – no up or down except the kind arbitrarily set by the TARDIS, and that is his absolute favorite thing about space. Or one of, he has trouble deciding.

He helps Donna to her feet and over to the door. She skims her open hand outside the TARDIS, though still safely within their air pocket. She opens her mouth as if to say something – and he can see from the glitter in her eyes that it’s something vast and scientific, with Time Lord written all over it – but then a shadow washes over her face.

Instead, she says, “I bought space calendars.”

The Doctor is lost.

“What?” he asks.

“Y’know, calendars, but instead of landscapes, or kittens, they had space on ‘em. I couldn’t stop looking at all the stars— the constellations weren’t right, I was thinking of the belt of stars above Midnight, trying to find…” she trails off and laughs. “I think I wanted to find Poosh and see if they really got their moon back.”

“They did,” he assures her with a wide grin. “I checked.”

“’Course you did,” Donna agrees.

She’s gone fidgety again, and in the end it’s _her_ shoving _him_ back to the controls, apparently unable to resist the internal call of run, run. The cloud is good for a laugh, but they’re both more interested in the supernova anyway.

“That’s the one at Henize 2-428, right?” Donna asks. “But those white dwarf stars aren’t gonna collapse for another 700 million years.”

The Doctor nods in agreement.

“Well, I do happen to own a time machine. I’m sure with a bit of… Jiggery-pokery…”

Donna lets out a rough gasp of air and clasps his hands in hers. For a second he panics, thinking it’s the onset of more pain, but then a wild smile spreads across Donna’s face.

“Oh, spaceman, have I got an idea for you,” she croons gleefully.

She doesn’t even bother to explain before rushing over to the controls. She presses three buttons and flips a lever, then homes in on the stabilizers. Finally, she flicks a tiny switch up near the top of the console that he’s never noticed before.

“Oh, come on, tell me. What idea?”

“How d’you feel about watching those dwarf stars collide in stop-motion?” Donna asks smugly, and the Doctor’s hearts are singing. “Now that I’ve got the orbit coordinates and gravity field locked, and switched time-steering to analog, separate from space-steering…”

He has waited several thousand years for this woman and it is so much better than he could have imagined.

“Of course!” he says, smacking himself in the forehead with the heel of his palm. “We can orbit the stars as they approach collision and orbit through time as well, with the TARDIS doors open and everything locked and stabilized! Flash-braking the TARDIS every, what, million years up until the collision? That is brilliant, Donna you’re _brilliant_! Fantastic! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because _you’re_ not half-human,” she insists, tapping him on the nose as he approaches to hug her for her ingenuity. “700 million year collisions in twelve minutes or less, courtesy of the Doctor Donna.”

Then, at last, she does let him wind his skinny arms around her. Together they’re a circle of warmth with three beating hearts. And best is when she shoves him away at last and ruffs a hand through his cropped hair with a fond smile that he hasn’t seen since the last time he’d worn his tan coat.

“Come on, spaceman, hop to it!” Donna orders.

He does just that, and soon they’re spinning through time and space with a front-row seat to a binary supernova.

The sensation reminds him of one of those old rotating picture wheels. But with two stars colliding instead of a man on a bicycle with a big front wheel, and therefore infinitely better. It’s something he’s going to do again, he knows it. He’s grown so old, himself, but even on her last day alive, Donna is as creative and radiant as a child and it’s half the reason the Doctor’s in love with humanity.

He feels like he can _see_ again, like the universe is all shiny and new again, just for him, just for Donna.

There’s something sad too, at the corner of his mind, _I’m burning up a sun just to say goodbye_ , and he wonders if he’s doing that now too but squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head and pulls right out of it. Rose Tyler is always, still, _always_ , a radiant dream behind his eyes. He doesn’t know even after four regenerations and thousands of years if he’s quite done right by her.

He hopes, at least.

The Doctor almost misses the blast itself, trying to pull himself out of those treacherous thoughts, but Donna snatches up his hand and squeezes and he opens his eyes again just in time. It’s fantastic. In a fit of giddy laughter he twirls Donna by their connected hands and together they bounce about like children watching fireworks.

“You did it!” he tells her, elated.

“You’re damn right I did, beanpole!”

Eventually they both plop down ungracefully on the control room steps. Mouth twisted in a wicked, childish grin, Donna elbows him in the side. The Doctor nudges her back and offers a flash of white teeth. He doesn’t remember the last time he smiled so much.

 

Donna has to catch her breath – for longer than she’d like. But she’s getting old, that’s to be expected, and especially with her mind now running miles ahead of her physicality. Lightyears ahead, even. Bounding over stars, twisting through the atmospheres of planets she knows she’s not seen, there’s still an echo of the Doctor’s consciousness in her memories crooning about some planet or other, one he’d surely visited as naught but a babe when he absconded with his little blue box in the first place. How many thousands of years ago is that? And how can a thousand years seem like so little to her now?

He’s got to rest a large hand over hers and lean over to look into her eyes with his – so dark and pretty, somehow this idiot beanpole is always pretty – before she realizes she’s zoned out.

“What’s that?” she wonders, blinking.

“Nothing, just—well. Onwards?” he asks cautiously. “Medusa Cascade?”

Donna nods.

“’Course. Got to get a proper look at it now it’s not filled with planets, haven’t I?”

And she’s got back enough energy to help him pilot again, which makes her heart – hearts, heart, she can almost feel a second one pulsing in her chest only it’s just a hallucination from her Time Lord mind – race. The console is much cleaner than she remembers. Not clean like no dirt and grime, but clean like there is no longer a random bike handlebar or a snowglobe in place of actual spaceship, space-agey parts. Which makes it look real sharp, but it’s also a bit sad, too, somehow.

Then suddenly the light changes and she has to blink because everything’s gone from white and silver to a familiar sort of yellow-orange and blue. She can see across the way that the corals are back and really any lesser person would’ve choked up. The Doctor’s gazing around with his new face in that old lighting in that old coat and everything feels right. It’s a little dimmer, sure, but it makes Donna feel a bit less washed-out, too.

“Ah,” the Doctor says quietly. “Old desktop.”

But before Donna can try harder to see how he feels about it, they’ve landed and he strides for the TARDIS doors. They’re surrounded by color, a vision-wide wash of green, flecked with blue and red. Peaceful, swirling. The last place they’d been together, their last battle as a team.

Donna takes a deep breath and it’s bittersweet on her tongue.

“I could use a drink,” she says suddenly, and the Doctor lets out a quick snort of a laugh behind her.

“Want some alcoholic space cloud?” he asks slyly.

Donna rolls her eyes.

“I don’t wanna pilot all the way back there just for that.”

Not to mention that most of the cloud is undrinkable, and sifting through such a huge entity just for space booze seems a bit daunting for a last day. She’s only just got to the Medusa Cascade, and she wants to enjoy it.

“I actually made a trip there once before. Managed to nip a bit that’s not methanol,” the Doctor says, grinning. “With some help from the TARDIS.”

“Well, there you go!”

So the two of them laugh and drink a small glass of raspberry space rum each, clinking a toast to their combined brilliance as they look out at the Medusa Cascade. Donna realizes that this day is one of the few times she remembers the Doctor leaving the door open so long – the only other had been on that Christmas that they watched the Earth form together. And half the time he’d been trying to get her to jump into it from her kidnapper’s car, the loon!

The Doctor looks completely different, even stands and sits and walks differently, but there’s something about him that’s still familiar, the way that her own face in the mirror is. Looking at him still makes her want to cry. He’s so old and sad, a stupid lonely spaceman, and she wonders how many people he’s lost since the last time she saw him. How many travels he’s made alone. How much it must have killed him, to never be able to see her again. They’re best mates, the very best of.

And he’d given it up to let her live her entire life. And then, at the very end, come back to return all the things he’d had to take away from them both. Giving her the best of both worlds.

“Oi, spaceman,” she says to get his attention, and even to herself she sounds so tired. “Quite a pair we make, eh?”

He beams at her but his eyes, though lively, are still so hurt.

“That’s right we do,” he assures her. “The very best in the universe. You and me, Donna Noble, we’re brilliant.”

“And pretty,” Donna teases, grinning over the lip of her glass.

 

It’s a joke, he knows it, but with the shimmer of starlight in her eyes, the slight glow of time and space whirling about in her mind, he doubts anyone in the universe could find her anything less than gorgeous. Ethereal. There are lines on her face – laugh lines, wrinkles; her skin’s a bit translucent like she’s stretched too thin, her hair’s a bit coarser than he remembers. She’s old, and that’s beautiful too because she’s lived an entire life of joys and sorrows, even if it was one without him. But she’s Donna, as well, and just by that stroke there’s no way to _not_ marvel over her. The Doctor Donna.

He takes her free hand in his and squeezes her cold fingers gently.

“Beautiful,” he agrees in all seriousness.

 

It’s then that Donna can feel hot tears slipping down her cheeks. Her spaceman, looking at her old tired face and telling her it’s beautiful. Donna knows she’s still good-looking – she can see it every morning in the mirror, in her eyes and her cheekbones, and the pictures of her laughing with her grandchildren. The beauty of someone who lived a fulfilling life. But to have the man that’s seen a billion worlds look at her like she’s the only star in the sky, well, that’s something special.

Foolish a thought as it was, she’d wondered when she looked into his eyes for the first time in almost fifty years and actually _saw_ him, if he’d ever be able to see _her_. If he’d still be able to see an old woman as his best mate in the universe. Of course he can, though. Of course. Where would he be without her? At the end of the day she’s still Donna, and any idiot can see that even if it’s been more than a thousand years for him.

They’re together again, but he still looks so, so sad.

She leans in to look at him, framing his dark, pretty face in her hands, and she wonders.

 

“Is this only the next one?” Donna asks him, brushing the pad of her thumb over his cheek. “The next face?”

“No,” admits the Doctor, and there’s fear and excitement thrumming in his chest because he isn’t sure how she’ll take it if he shows her but he wants to. “There were others. Three more, I couldn’t—I was, scared to come here.”

“Three more? But you’d have finished your regeneration cycle,” she notes curiously.

The Doctor smiles.

“It’s… Complicated,” he tells her. “I’ve gotten a new one.”

“Show them to me?”

He stands, and she releases him, and he’s the Doctor so of course he’s not trembling but the impulse is there. With the flip of a switch, they’re standing there, holograms of the last three Doctors and he isn’t sure what to think of the expression on Donna’s face when she looks back at him after seeing Caecilius.

“That’s—”

He nods.

“Did you, was that face…?”

“For you,” he tells her, shyly. “You taught me—I just, you made me remember. Just someone, just saving someone, is, is what I do. It was you, who helped me be the Doctor again, and I… I’d forgotten too much, because it hurt. And I didn’t want to forget anymore.”

A smile spreads across Donna’s face, as bright as a sun. Then she all but tackles him in a hug, though he’s barely moved by her negligible weight.

“Oh, spaceman,” she murmurs into his shoulder. “I wish I could’ve been there, for you. I didn’t want to leave you all alone, I didn’t wanna go.”

“I know,” the Doctor says hoarsely. “I know, Donna. But I didn’t want to lose you.”

She pulls back and looks up at him, and then says with a slight twist of the lips, “If I’d been with there with you, I never would’ve let you commit such travesties against fashion; like wearing that tweed, or a bowtie. Or slicking your hair like that.”

She mimes the flippy arch of his Eleventh (really thirteenth) regeneration’s hair and pulls a face.

“You should’ve seen him wear a fez,” the Doctor adds, just to aid her in returning to mirth and away from more serious things. “… River shot it.”

“Your wife, that archaeologist,” Donna says immediately. “So you saw her again?”

“I’m still seeing her, here and there,” admits the Doctor. “She crops up every so often.”

The instances are getting rarer, further apart, but he doesn’t tell her that because he doesn’t want to spoil the mood. Instead, he tells her about moons and stars, about saving Gallifrey, about his Ponds, about Clara, all the good things and none of the bad even though he knows she’d listen to both.

And he can tell she knows he’s skipping so many pieces because she lays a hand on his and squeezes gently. They lapse into silence for a long while, turning their attention back to the light of the Medusa Cascade, entranced, together, by its beauty, by all of themselves still sitting in its depths.

“Did you ever think,” Donna says suddenly, “that today is only the day I die because you came to do this?”

The question stops his hearts cold.

“What?” the Doctor croaks out.

Donna smiles at him, something pitying, then leans back on her hands and looks up at the top of the console room.

“Well,” she says. “I’m not sick. Or particularly unwell. I’ve not got some sort of heart condition, or anything that would explain my dropping dead today of all days. In fact, with my brain – your brain, my brain, _whatever_ – working again, it’s easy to tell there’s not anything wrong with me that’s fatal.”

A spasm runs through her frame and she lurches forward, curling in on herself and pressing long fingers against her skull as if to hold it all in. The Doctor can almost see the glow of gold seeping out from between the hands she has clutched to her head.

“’Cept this, of course,” Donna revises, still shaking, and then laughs and begins to ramble. “Oh, it hurts, like opening my eyes too wide, like, like… I’m trying to see everything and everyone and everywhen but I’ve not got the hardware to do it. Which, I suppose, I haven’t. Couldn’t have tossed me a Time Lord nervous system too, huh, when we were doling out bits? I mean, half-human, half-Time Lord, but if he’s only got one heart too, and he’s mostly human, how come he can handle it and I can’t? I just want to see and know and go everywhere and see and see and see and s—”

Donna finally cuts off her jarring repetition with a vigorous shake of her head, doubled over with her hands fisted in her white hair. They sit in silence, and for once the Doctor doesn’t know what to do. She’s falling apart, but he had been prepared for that. It’s the idea that he’s the one who kills her, when she would otherwise have lived who knew how much longer, that cuts like ice through his bone marrow.

“Huon particles,” Donna gasps out at last, out of nowhere, and she sounds almost as old as him.

 

Donna can feel her head darting left and right without her permission, like it’s chasing after something, flitting just beyond her reach, if she just turned fast enough she could catch a glimpse— Stars, gold, Huon particles, something, bursts behind her eyes like a migraine and suddenly she’s in the Doctor’s lap and he’s cradling her with the most heartbroken look on his face.

“Sorry,” he says, voice wobbling. “Donna I’m so sorry.”

Only distantly, years beyond the pain, does she recall what he might be apologizing for and wants to kick herself and her over-curious Time Lord brain for picking that oh-so-peculiar detail to fixate on. Because the Doctor, idiot that he is, is gonna blame himself for her death. She glares at him with all the strength she can muster against the hot pounding of her temples.

“Don’t you go ‘sorry’ing me, sunshine!” Donna snaps. “Don’t you even dare. I had a flippin’ amazing life, okay, I had grandchildren! Me! I saved the universe! And I just, just invented stop-motion space-time travel! I drank _raspberry flippin’ space booze_! Right now I am, I am the happiest I’ve been in my life! You gave all this back to me! You got nothing to be sorry about!”

And it’s true, she’s lived her life, a good life, a wonderful, normal, time-travelling, universe-saving life. A life she wants to go back and proudly show her younger self, the one who constantly buckled under the strain of titles like ‘useless’ and ‘worthless’. _This is you, Donna_ , she wants to say to that self, _and you are bloody brilliant_. She’s complete again, all the timey-bits merging back together with her normal life, and anything, any pain is worth that, she’s done all she set out to do.

The universe is safe, or in well-enough hands with the Doctor about. Her children are grown up and her grandchildren are nearly too and they’re all gonna be fine; they’re Temple-Nobles, ‘course they are. She’s gonna see Shaun again after two years of missing him, because if she doesn’t then whoever runs the afterlife is gonna be real sorry about it. Donna loves her life, her little tiny human life – and like the TARDIS it’s so much bigger on the inside, so much more important than it looks – but she’s just so happy to see and remember again, to be Donna made whole that she’s not even sure another ten years would be worth delaying this moment.

The Doctor still looks like he doesn’t believe her, the idiot.

“Look at me, spaceman,” she demands. “Look at me, I’m right where I wanna be. This is the perfect last day, alright? If you really waited til I was about to keel over any second, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of this. Just be… I dunno, wheezin’ on a bed or something. This feels _right_ , so don’t you try and take that away from me.”

Finally, he looks properly chastened, though he still carries her gently over to the sofa to rest, while he pilots them to the last stop. The Ood. It’s been so long, since she’s seen them. But even through the TARDIS doors, she can hear strains of song that make her mouth pull into a tired smile.

 

The Doctor remembers to bundle Donna in the warmest coat he can find – the black one lined with faux-fur, from their first trip to the planet – before he carries her out into the ice and snow. They are met almost immediately by a faction of Ood, led by a rather familiar one in a navy blue jumpsuit.

“Look Donna,” he says as he shifts his arm to nudge her into a more upright position, voice tight with emotion. “It’s Ood Sigma.”

She looks up at the Ood in question and smiles, warmly, managing a little wave of her fingertips. Ood Sigma places a hand over his heart and bows.

“Welcome back, Doctor Donna. We will sing you to your rest, the way we did the Doctor so many years ago.”

“Thank you,” Donna murmurs. “I loved your singing. The happy singing, though, I couldn’t—I’m so sorry, I couldn’t stand the sad. It hurt too much.”

“There is nothing to apologize for,” says Ood Sigma. “Simply, listen.”

The Ood gather around them and sing, and it isn’t sad at all. It’s beautiful, and happy; triumphant and nostalgic and glorious. How could it be anything less for her, after all? He can hear in their song the way she saved him – just one person, it doesn’t have to be the whole town – and the way she cried for them, and the whirling energy of a human and Time Lord combined into something beautiful and new. Donna’s spasms are getting worse, and she’s clutching her head as the Doctor sinks to his knees and cradles her to his chest, close as possible to the thumping of his two hearts. There are tears on both their cheeks, and the Ood are still singing.

“I love you Donna Noble,” he chokes out because there’s been too many times he never said those words to people when he needed to. “You’re my best friend.”

 

With singing Ood around her in the sparkling, whirling snow, Donna Temple-Noble is more at peace than she’s ever been in the entirety of her – the Doctor’s, hers, their – life. It almost doesn’t hurt anymore, or if it does, the pounding strain of an endlessly expansive mind shoved into a tiny human body is no longer anything but a background thrum. Waves of sound seep through every molecule of her, and she’s just drifting apart, peaceful.

Only the frantic double-beat of the Doctor’s hearts grounds her in the physical, and trust the sappy moron to tell her he loves her now of all times. He’s learned, though, it seems, since the last time she’s seen him, how to say it at all – and she’s glad of that at least.

Her hand clenches around a fistful of his lapel, grounding her for one last sentence, one of the most important goodbyes of her life.

“And you’re mine… Spaceman…”

Donna can feel herself drifting off into the snowy ether, off to somewhere wonderful, but she doesn’t let go of that familiar tan coat, not for anything.

 

He knows she’s gone when her heartbeat doesn’t pulse against his fingers anymore. He knows she’s gone when the Ood stop singing.

As light as she’d been, she’s even lighter in death, and when he looks down at her she’s smiling. The Doctor feels hollow, scraped out like a jack-o-lantern, but the ache in his bones is one of business completed. They’d had their last adventure.

The Ood are silent, a procession of witnesses as he carries Donna back to the TARDIS.

Everything in him is numb, everything, while the Doctor’s guiding them back to Donna’s home. He carries her up the stairs, tucks her in as if she’s just a child who fell asleep on the ride home. Then he presses a kiss to her forehead and turns and leaves.

He means to go somewhere with booze that’s illegal on Earth.

The TARDIS takes him to a newly forming star instead. Fantastic and beautiful, and in just the right range to support life on the planets that will come to orbit it. The only one there to witness it, he calls it the Noble Sun and can’t help but to tell it everything about the woman it reminds him of.

For hours, the Doctor sits cross-legged in the open doorway of the TARDIS, like a child, wearing his old tan overcoat like a security blanket, and watches a new life begin.


End file.
